Sadly, the drowning of children in domestic baths is an all to common occurrence. There can be many situations where children are at risk, either from lack of parental attention or where a bath has accidentally been left filled.
The filled bath tub becomes a high risk for young children. Often children enjoy baths for extended periods of time but a busy parent may get distracted, putting children at risk.
Devices for draining a bath in case of an emergency are known. For example U.S. Pat. No. 2,926,360 to Erickson et al, discloses a bathtub fitted with touch bars along the sides of the bath so that a person in the bath falling asleep or collapsing, is likely to hit his or her head on a bar, causing electrical energizing of a solenoid to open the drain plug. This is unlikely to be effective for children and in any case cannot act to limit the time a child spends in the water.
A safe technique of managing a child's bath time is to set a time limit to the amount of time they have to bath. Ideally a system that unplugs the bath and allows the water to drain would be advantageous however to date there has not been a device or system that allows the automated drainage of a domestic bath tub.
The described invention is designed to address these issues.